PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIEDReport of the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians

Summary

The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment
of Civilians was established by act of Congress in 1980 and directed
to

1. review the facts and circumstances surrounding
Executive Order Numbered 9066, issued February 19, 1942, and the impact
of such Executive Order on American citizens and permanent resident
aliens;

2. review directives of United States military forces
requiring the relocation and, in some cases, detention in internment
camps of American citizens, including Aleut civilians, and permanent
resident aliens of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands; and

3. recommend appropriate remedies.

Map reprinted from Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy (1976), by kind
permission of William Morrow & Company, Inc. (click on image for
an enlargement in a new window)

In fulfilling this mandate, the Commission held 20
days of hearings in cities across the country, particularly on the West
Coast, hearing testimony from more than 750 witnesses: evacuees, former
government officials, public figures, interested citizens, and
historians and other professionals who have studied the subjects of
Commission inquiry. An extensive effort was made to locate and to review
the records of government action and to analyze other sources of
information including contemporary writings, personal accounts and
historical analyses.

By presenting this report to Congress, the Commission
fulfills the instruction to submit a written report of its findings.
Like the body of the report, this summary is divided into two parts. The
first describes actions taken pursuant to Executive Order 9066,
particularly the treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent and
resident aliens of Japanese nationality. The second covers the treatment
of Aleuts from the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands.

PART I: NISEI AND ISSEI*

On February 19, 1942, ten weeks after the Pearl
Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order
9066, which gave to the Secretary of War and the military commanders to
whom he delegated authority, the power to exclude any and all persons,
citizens and aliens, from designated areas in order to provide security
against sabotage, espionage and fifth column activity. Shortly
thereafter, all American citizens of Japanese descent were prohibited
from living, working or traveling on the West Coast of the United
States. The same prohibition applied to the generation of Japanese
immigrants who, pursuant to federal law and despite long residence in
the United States, were not permitted to become American citizens.
Initially, this exclusion was to be carried out by "voluntary"
relocation. That policy inevitably failed, and these American citizens
and their alien parents were removed by the Army, first to "assembly
centers"temporary quarters at racetracks and fairgroundsand
then to "relocation centers"bleak barrack camps mostly in desolate
areas of the West. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded
by military police. Departure was permitted only after a loyalty review
on terms set, in consultation with the military, by the War Relocation
Authority, the civilian agency that ran the camps. Many of those removed
from the West Coast were eventually allowed to leave the camps to join
the Army, go to college outside the West Coast or to whatever private
employment was available. For a larger number, however, the war years
were spent behind barbed wire; and for those who were released, the
prohibition against returning to their homes and occupations on the West
Coast was not lifted until December 1944.

*The first generation of ethnic Japanese born in the
United states are Nisei; the Issei are the immigrant
generation from Japan; and those who returned to Japan as children for
education are Kibei.

This policy of exclusion, removal and detention was
executed against 120,000 people without individual review, and exclusion
was continued virtually without regard for their demonstrated loyalty to
the United States. Congress was fully aware of and supported the policy
of removal and detention; it sanctioned the exclusion by enacting a
statute which made criminal the violation of orders issued pursuant to
Executive Order 9066. The United States Supreme Court held the exclusion
constitutionally permissible in the context of war, but struck down the
incarceration of admittedly loyal American citizens on the ground that
it was not based on statutory authority.

All this was done despite the fact that not a single
documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was
committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident
Japanese alien on the West Coast.

No mass exclusion or detention, in any part of the
country, was ordered against American citizens of German or Italian
descent. Official actions against enemy aliens of other nationalities
were much more individualized and selective than those imposed on the
ethnic Japanese.

The exclusion, removal and detention inflicted
tremendous human cost. There was the obvious cost of homes and
businesses sold or abandoned under circumstances of great distress, as
well as injury to careers and professional advancement. But, most
important, there was the loss of liberty and the personal stigma of
suspected disloyalty for thousands of people who knew themselves to be
devoted to their country's cause and to its ideals but whose repeated
protestations of loyalty were discountedonly to be demonstrated
beyond any doubt by the record of Nisei soldiers, who returned from the
battlefields of Europe as the most decorated and distinguished combat
unit of World War II, and by the thousands of other Nisei who served
against the enemy in the Pacific, mostly in military intelligence. The
wounds of the exclusion and detention have healed in some respects, but
the scars of that experience remain, painfully real in the minds of
those who lived through the suffering and deprivation of the camps.

The personal injustice of excluding, removing and
detaining loyal American citizens is manifest. Such events are
extraordinary and unique in American history. For every citizen and for
American public life, they pose haunting questions about our country and
its past. It has been the Commission's task to examine the central
decisions of this historythe decision to exclude, the decision to
detain, the decision to release from detention and the decision to end
exclusion. The Commission has analyzed both how and why those decisions
were made, and what their consequences were. And in order to illuminate
those events, the mainland experience was compared to the treatment of
Japanese Americans in Hawaii and to the experience of other Americans of
enemy alien descent, particularly German Americans.

The Decision to Exclude

The Context of the Decision. First, the
exclusion and removal were attacks on the ethnic Japanese which followed
a long and ugly history of West Coast anti-Japanese agitation and
legislation. Antipathy and hostility toward the ethnic Japanese was a
major factor of the public life of the West Coast states for more than
forty years before Pearl Harbor. Under pressure from California,
immigration from Japan had been severely restricted in 1908 and entirely
prohibited in 1924. Japanese immigrants were barred from American
citizenship, although their children born here were citizens by birth.
California and the other western states prohibited Japanese immigrants
from owning land. In part the hostility was economic, emerging in
various white American groups who began to feel competition,
particularly in agriculture, the principal occupation of the immigrants.
The anti-Japanese agitation also fed on racial stereotypes and fears:
the "yellow peril" of an unknown Asian culture achieving substantial
influence on the Pacific Coast or of a Japanese population alleged to be
growing far faster than the white population. This agitation and
hostility persisted, even though the ethnic Japanese never exceeded
three percent of the population of California, the state of greatest
concentration.

The ethnic Japanese, small in number and with no
political voicethe citizen generation was just reaching voting age
in 1940had become a convenient target for political demagogues,
and over the years all the major parties indulged in anti-Japanese
rhetoric and programs. Political bullying was supported by organized
interest groups who adopted anti-Japanese agitation as a consistent part
of their program: the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, the
Joint Immigration Committee, the American Legion, the California State
Federation of Labor and the California State Grange.

This agitation attacked a number of ethnic Japanese
cultural traits or patterns which were woven into a bogus theory that
the ethnic Japanese could not or would not assimilate or become
"American." Dual citizenship, Shinto, Japanese language schools, and the
education of many ethnic Japanese children in Japan were all used as
evidence. But as a matter of fact, Japan's laws on dual citizenship went
no further than those of many European countries in claiming the
allegiance of the children of its nationals born abroad. Only a small
number of ethnic Japanese subscribed to Shinto, which in some forms
included veneration of the Emperor. The language schools were not unlike
those of other first-generation immigrants, and the return of some
children to Japan for education was as much a reaction to hostile
discrimination and an uncertain future as it was a commitment to the
mores, much less the political doctrines, of Japan. Nevertheless, in
1942 these popular misconceptions infected the views of a great many
West Coast people who viewed the ethnic Japanese as alien and
unassimilated.

Second, Japanese armies in the Pacific won a rapid,
startling string of victories against the United States and its allies
in the first months of World War II. On the same day as the attack on
Pearl Harbor, the Japanese struck the Malay Peninsula, Hong Kong, Wake
and Midway Islands and attacked the Philippines. The next day the
Japanese Army invaded Thailand. On December 13 Guam fell; on December 24
and 25 the Japanese captured Wake Island and occupied Hong Kong. Manila
was evacuated on December 27, and the American army retreated to the
Bataan Peninsula. After three months the troops isolated in the
Philippines were forced to surrender unconditionallythe worst
American defeat since the Civil War. In January and February 1942, the
military position of the United States in the Pacific was perilous.
There was fear of Japanese attacks on the West Coast.

Next, contrary to the facts, there was a widespread
belief, supported by a statement by Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy,
that the Pearl Harbor attack had been aided by sabotage and fifth column
activity by ethnic Japanese in Hawaii. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the
government knew that this was not true, but took no effective measures
to disabuse public belief that disloyalty had contributed to massive
American losses on December 7, 1941. Thus the country was unfairly led
to believe that both American citizens of Japanese descent and resident
Japanese aliens threatened American security.

Fourth, as anti-Japanese organizations began to speak
out and rumors from Hawaii spread, West Coast politicians quickly took
up the familiar anti-Japanese cry. The Congressional delegations in
Washington organized themselves and pressed the War and Justice
Departments and the President for stern measures to control the ethnic
Japanesemoving quickly from control of aliens to evacuation and
removal of citizens. In California, Governor Olson, Attorney General
Warren, Mayor Bowron of Los Angeles and many local authorities joined
the clamor. These opinions were not informed by any knowledge of actual
military risks, rather they were stoked by virulent agitation which
encountered little opposition. Only a few churchmen and academicians
were prepared to defend the ethnic Japanese. There was little or no
political risk in claiming that it was "better to be safe than sorry"
and, as many did, that the best way for ethnic Japanese to prove their
loyalty was to volunteer to enter detention. The press amplified the
unreflective emotional excitement of the hour. Through late January and
early February 1942, the rising clamor from the West Coast was heard
within the federal government as its demands became more draconian.

Making and Justifying the Decision. The
exclusion of the ethnic Japanese from the West Coast was recommended to
the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, by Lieutenant General John L.
DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western Defense Command with
responsibility for West Coast security. President Roosevelt relied on
Secretary Stimson's recommendations in issuing Executive Order 9066.

The justification given for the measure was military
necessity. The claim of military necessity is most clearly set out in
three places: General DeWitt's February 14, 1942, recommendation to
Secretary Stimson for exclusion; General DeWitt's Final Report:
Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942; and the government's
brief in the Supreme Court defending the Executive Order in
Hirabayashi v. United States. General DeWitt's February
1942 recommendation presented the following rationale for the
exclusion:

In the war in which we are now engaged racial
affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy
race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United
States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become
"Americanized," the racial strains are undiluted. To conclude otherwise
is to expect that children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever
all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese subjects, ready to fight
and, if necessary, to die for Japan in a war against the nation of their
parents. That Japan is allied with Germany and Italy in this struggle is
no ground for assuming that any Japanese, barred from assimilation by
convention as he is, though born and raised in the United States, will
not turn against this nation when the final test of loyalty comes. It,
therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000
potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are
indications that these were organized and ready for concerted action at
a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place
to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will
be taken.

There are two unfounded justifications for exclusion
expressed here: first, that ethnicity ultimately determines loyalty;
second, that "indications" suggest that ethnic Japanese "are organized
and ready for concerted action"the best argument for this being
the fact that it hadn't happened.

The first evaluation is not a military one but one
for sociologists or historians. It runs counter to a basic premise on
which the American nation of immigrants is builtthat loyalty to
the United States is a matter of individual choice and not determined by
ties to an ancestral country. In the case of German Americans, the First
World War demonstrated that race did not determine loyalty, and no
negative assumption was made with regard to citizens of German or
Italian descent during the Second World War. The second judgment was, by
the General's own admission, unsupported by any evidence. General
DeWitt's recommendation clearly does not provide a credible rationale,
based on military expertise, for the necessity of exclusion.

In his 1943 Final Report, General DeWitt cited
a number of factors in support of the exclusion decision: signaling from
shore to enemy submarines; arms and contraband found by the FBI during
raids on ethnic Japanese homes and businesses; dangers to the ethnic
Japanese from vigilantes; concentration of ethnic Japanese around or
near militarily sensitive areas; the number of Japanese ethnic
organizations on the coast which might shelter pro-Japanese attitudes or
activities such as Emperor-worshipping Shinto; and the presence of the
Kibei, who had spent some time in Japan.

The first two items point to demonstrable military
danger. But the reports of shore-to-ship signaling were investigated by
the Federal Communications Commission, the agency with relevant
expertise, and no identifiable cases of such signaling were
substantiated. The FBI did confiscate arms and contraband from some
ethnic Japanese, but most were items normally in the possession of any
law-abiding civilian, and the FBI concluded that these searches had
uncovered no dangerous persons that "we could not otherwise know about."
Thus neither of these "facts" militarily justified exclusion.

There had been some acts of violence against ethnic
Japanese on the West Coast and feeling against them ran high, but
"protective custody" is not an acceptable rationale for exclusion.
Protection against vigilantes is a civilian matter that would involve
the military only in extreme cases. But there is no evidence that such
extremity had been reached on the West Coast in early 1942. Moreover,
"protective custody" could never justify exclusion and detention for
months and years.

General DeWitt's remaining points are repeated in the
Hirabayashi brief, which also emphasizes dual nationality,
Japanese language schools and the high percentage of aliens (who, by
law, had been barred from acquiring American citizenship) in the ethnic
population. These facts represent broad social judgments of little or no
military significance in themselves. None supports the claim of
disloyalty to the United States and all were entirely legal. If the same
standards were applied to other ethnic groups, as Morton Grodzins, an
early analyst of the exclusion decision, applied it to ethnic Italians
on the West Coast, an equally compelling and meaningless case for
"disloyalty" could be made. In short, these social and cultural patterns
were not evidence of any threat to West Coast military security.

In sum, the record does not permit the conclusion
that military necessity warranted the exclusion of ethnic Japanese from
the West Coast.

The Conditions Which Permitted the
Decision. Having concluded that no military necessity supported
the exclusion, the Commission has attempted to determine how the
decision came to be made.

First, General DeWitt apparently believed what he
told Secretary Stimson: ethnicity determined loyalty. Moreover, he
believed that the ethnic Japanese were so alien to the thought processes
of white Americans that it was impossible to distinguish the loyal from
the disloyal. On this basis he believed them to be potential enemies
among whom loyalty could not be determined.

Second, the FBI and members of Naval Intelligence who
had relevant intelligence responsibility were ignored when they stated
that nothing more than careful watching of suspicious individuals or
individual reviews of loyalty were called for by existing circumstances.
In addition, the opinions of the Army General Staff that no sustained
Japanese attack on the West Coast was possible were ignored.

Third, General DeWitt relied heavily on civilian
politicians rather than informed military judgments in reaching his
conclusions as to what actions were necessary, and civilian politicians
largely repeated the prejudiced, unfounded themes of anti-Japanese
factions and interest groups on the West Coast.

Fourth, no effective measures were taken by President
Roosevelt to calm the West Coast public and refute the rumors of
sabotage and fifth column activity at Pearl Harbor.

Fifth, General DeWitt was temperamentally disposed to
exaggerate the measures necessary to maintain security and placed
security far ahead of any concern for the liberty of citizens.

Sixth, Secretary Stimson and John J. McCloy,
Assistant Secretary of War, both of whose views on race differed from
those of General DeWitt, failed to insist on a clear military
justification for the measures General DeWitt wished to undertake.

Seventh, Attorney General Francis Biddle, while
contending that exclusion was unnecessary, did not argue to the
President that failure to make out a case of military necessity on the
facts would render the exclusion constitutionally impermissible or that
the Constitution prohibited exclusion on the basis of ethnicity given
the facts on the West Coast.

Eighth, those representing the interests of civil
rights and civil liberties in Congress, the press and other public
forums were silent or indeed supported exclusion. Thus there was no
effective opposition to the measures vociferously sought by numerous
West Coast interest groups, politicians and journalists.

Finally, President Roosevelt, without raising the
question to the level of Cabinet discussion or requiring any careful or
thorough review of the situation, and despite the Attorney General's
arguments and other information before him, agreed with Secretary
Stimson that the exclusion should be carried out.

The Decision to Detain

With the signing of Executive Order 9066, the course
of the President and the War Department was set: American citizens and
alien residents of Japanese ancestry would be compelled to leave the
West Coast on the basis of wartime military necessity. For the War
Department and the Western Defense Command, the problem became primarily
one of method and operation, not basic policy. General DeWitt first
tried "voluntary" resettlement: the ethnic Japanese were to move outside
restricted military zones of the West Coast but otherwise were free to
go wherever they chose. From a military standpoint this policy was
bizarre, and it was utterly impractical. If the ethnic Japanese had been
excluded because they were potential saboteurs and spies, any such
danger was not extinguished by leaving them at large in the interior
where there were, of course, innumerable dams, power lines, bridges and
war industries to be disrupted or spied upon. Conceivably sabotage in
the interior could be synchronized with a Japanese raid or invasion for
a powerful fifth column effect. This raises serious doubts as to how
grave the War Department believed the supposed threat to be. Indeed, the
implications were not lost on the citizens and politicians of the
interior western states, who objected in the belief that people who
threatened wartime security in California were equally dangerous in
Wyoming and Idaho.

The War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian
agency created by the President to supervise the relocation and
initially directed by Milton Eisenhower, proceeded on the premise that
the vast majority of evacuees were law-abiding and loyal, and that, once
off the West Coast, they should be returned quickly to conditions
approximating normal life. This view was strenuously opposed by the
people and politicians of the mountain states. In April 1942, Milton
Eisenhower met with the governors and officials of the mountain states.
They objected to California using the interior states as a "dumping
ground" for a California "problem." They argued that people in their
states were so bitter over the voluntary evacuation that unguarded
evacuees would face physical danger. They wanted guarantees that the
government would forbid evacuees to acquire land and that it would
remove them at the end of the war. Again and again, detention camps for
evacuees were urged. The consensus was that a plan for reception centers
was acceptable so long as the evacuees remained under guard within the
centers.

In the circumstances, Milton Eisenhower decided that
the plan to move the evacuees into private employment would be
abandoned, at least temporarily. The War Relocation Authority dropped
resettlement and adopted confinement. Notwithstanding WRA's belief that
evacuees should be returned to normal productive life, it had, in
effect, become their jailer. The politicians of the interior states had
achieved the program of detention.

The evacuees were to be held in camps behind barbed
wire and released only with government approval. For this course of
action no military justification was proffered. Instead, the WRA
contended that these steps were necessary for the benefit of evacuees
and that controls on their departure were designed to assure they would
not be mistreated by other Americans on leaving the camps.

It follows from the conclusion that there was no
justification in military necessity for the exclusion, that there was no
basis for the detention.

The Effect of the Exclusion and Detention

The history of the relocation camps and the assembly
centers that preceded them is one of suffering and deprivation visited
on people against whom no charges were, or could have been, brought. The
Commission hearing record is full of poignant, searing testimony that
recounts the economic and personal losses and injury caused by the
exclusion and the deprivations of detention. No summary can do this
testimony justice.

Families could take to the assembly centers and the
camps only what they could carry. Camp living conditions were Spartan.
People were housed in tar-papered barrack rooms of no more than 20 by 24
feet. Each room housed a family, regardless of family size. Construction
was often shoddy. Privacy was practically impossible and furnishings
were minimal. Eating and bathing were in mass facilities. Under
continuing pressure from those who blindly held to the belief that
evacuees harbored disloyal intentions, the wages paid for work at the
camps were kept to the minimal level of $12 a month for unskilled labor,
rising to $19 a month for professional employees. Mass living prevented
normal family communication and activities. Heads of families, no longer
providing food and shelter, found their authority to lead and to
discipline diminished.

The normal functions of community life continued but
almost always under a handicapdoctors were in short supply;
schools which taught typing had no typewriters and worked from
hand-me-down school books; there were not enough jobs.

The camp experience carried a stigma that no other
Americans suffered. The evacuees themselves expressed the indignity of
their conditions with particular power:

On May 16, 1942, my mother, two sisters, niece,
nephew, and I left . . . by train. Father joined us later. Brother left
earlier by bus. We took whatever we could carry. So much we left behind,
but the most valuable thing I lost was my freedom.

* * *

Henry went to the Control Station to register the
family. He came home with twenty tags, all numbered 10710, tags to be
attached to each piece of baggage, and one to hang from our coat lapels.
From then on, we were known as Family #10710.

The government's efforts to "Americanize" the
children in the camps were bitterly ironic:

An oft-repeated ritual in relocation camp schools . .
. was the salute to the flag followed by the singing of "My country,
'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty"a ceremony Caucasian teachers
found embarrassingly awkward if not cruelly poignant in the austere
prison-camp setting.

* * *

In some ways, I suppose, my life was not too
different from a lot of kids in America between the years 1942 and 1945.
I spent a good part of my time playing with my brothers and friends,
learned to shoot marbles, watched sandlot baseball and envied the older
kids who wore Boy Scout uniforms. We shared with the rest of America the
same movies, screen heroes and listened to the same heart-rending songs
of the forties. We imported much of America into the camps because,
after all, we were Americans. Through imitation of my brothers, who
attended grade school within the camp, I learned the salute to the flag
by the time I was five years old. I was learning, as best one could
learn in Manzanar, what it meant to live in America. But, I was also
learning the sometimes bitter price one has to pay for it.

After the war, through the Japanese American
Evacuation Claims Act, the government attempted to compensate for the
losses of real and personal property; inevitably that effort did not
secure full or fair compensation. There were many kinds of injury the
Evacuation Claims Act made no attempt to compensate: the stigma placed
on people who fell under the exclusion and relocation orders; the
deprivation of liberty suffered during detention; the psychological
impact of exclusion and relocation; the breakdown of family structure;
the loss of earnings or profits; physical injury or illness during
detention.

The Decision to End Detention

By October 1942, the government held over 100,000
evacuees in relocation camps. After the tide of war turned with the
American victory at Midway in June 1942, the possibility of serious
Japanese attack was no longer credible; detention and exclusion became
increasingly difficult to defend. Nevertheless, other than an
ineffective leave program run by the War Relocation Authority, the
government had no plans to remedy the situation and no means of
distinguishing the loyal from the disloyal. Total control of these
civilians in the presumed interest of state security was rapidly
becoming the accepted norm.

Determining the basis on which detention would be
ended required the government to focus on the justification for
controlling the ethnic Japanese. If the government took the position
that race determined loyalty or that it was impossible to distinguish
the loyal from the disloyal because "Japanese" patterns of thought and
behavior were too alien to white Americans, there would be little
incentive to end detention. If the government maintained the position
that distinguishing the loyal from the disloyal was possible and that
exclusion and detention were required only by the necessity of acting
quickly under the threat of Japanese attack in early 1942, then a
program to release those considered loyal should have been instituted in
the spring of 1942 when people were confined in the assembly
centers.

Neither position totally prevailed. General DeWitt
and the Western Defense Command took the first position and opposed any
review that would determine loyalty or threaten continued exclusion from
the West Coast. Thus, there was no loyalty review during the assembly
center period. Secretary Stimson and Assistant Secretary McCloy took the
second view, but did not act on it until the end of 1942 and then only
in a limited manner. At the end of 1942, over General DeWitt's
opposition, Secretary Stimson, Assistant Secretary McCloy and General
George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, decided to establish a volunteer
combat team of Nisei soldiers. The volunteers were to come from those
who had passed a loyalty review. To avoid the obvious unfairness of
allowing only those joining the military to establish their loyalty and
leave the camps, the War Department joined WRA in expanding the loyalty
review program to all adult evacuees.

This program was significant, but remained a
compromise. It provided an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to the
United States on the battlefields; despite the human sacrifice involved,
this was of immense practical importance in obtaining postwar acceptance
for the ethnic Japanese. It opened the gates of the camps for some and
began some reestablishment of normal life. But, with no apparent
rationale or justification, it did not end exclusion of the loyal from
the West Coast. The review program did not extend the presumption of
loyalty to American citizens of Japanese descent, who were subject to an
investigation and review not applied to other ethnic groups.

Equally important, although the loyalty review
program was the first major government decision in which the interests
of evacuees prevailed, the program was conducted so insensitively, with
such lack of understanding of the evacuees circumstances, that it became
one of the most divisive and wrenching episodes of the camp
detention.

After almost a year of what the evacuees considered
utterly unjust treatment at the hands of the government, the loyalty
review program began with filling out a questionnaire which posed two
questions requiring declarations of complete loyalty to the United
States. Thus, the questionnaire demanded a personal expression of
position from each evacueea choice between faith in one's future
in America and outrage at present injustice. Understandably most
evacuees probably had deeply ambiguous feelings about a government whose
rhetorical values of liberty and equality they wished to believe, but
who found their present treatment in painful contradiction to those
values. The loyalty questionnaire left little room to express that
ambiguity. Indeed, it provided an effective point of protest and
organization against the government, from which more and more evacuees
felt alienated. The questionnaire finally addressed the central question
of loyalty that underlay the exclusion policy, a question which had been
the predominant political and personal issue for the ethnic Japanese
over the past year; answering it required confronting the conflicting
emotions aroused by their relation to the government. Evacuee testimony
shows the intensity of conflicting emotions:

I answered both questions number 27 and 28 [the
loyalty questions] in the negative, not because of disloyalty but due to
the disgusting and shabby treatment given us. A few months after
completing the questionnaire, U.S. Army officers appeared at our camp
and gave us an interview to confirm our answers to the questions 27 and
28, and followed up with a question that in essence asked: "Are you
going to give up or renounce your U.S. citizenship?" to which I promptly
replied in the affirmative as a rebellious move. Sometime after the
interview, a form letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service
arrived saying if I wanted to renounce my U.S. citizenship, sign the
form letter and return. Well, I kept the Immigration and Naturalization
Service waiting.

* * *

Well, I am one of those that said "no, no" on it, one
of the "no, no" boys, and it is not that I was proud about it, it was
just that our legal rights were violated and I wanted to fight back.
However, I didn't want to take this sitting down. I was really angry. It
just got me so damned mad. Whatever we do, there was no help from
outside, and it seems to me that we are a race that doesn't count. So
therefore, this was one of the reasons for the "no, no" answer.

Personal responses to the questionnaire inescapably
became public acts open to community debate and scrutiny within the
closed world of the camps. This made difficult choices excruciating:

After I volunteered for the [military] service, some
people that I knew refused to speak to me. Some older people later
questioned my father for letting me volunteer, but he told them that I
was old enough to make up my own mind.

* * *

The resulting infighting, beatings, and verbal abuses
left families torn apart, parents against children, brothers against
sisters, relatives against relatives, and friends against friends. So
bitter was all this that even to this day, there are many amongst us who
do not speak about that period for fear that the same harsh feelings
might arise up again to the surface.

The loyalty review program was a point of decision
and division for those in the camps. The avowedly loyal were eligible
for release; those who were unwilling to profess loyalty or whom the
government distrusted were segregated from the main body of evacuees
into the Tule Lake camp, which rapidly became a center of disaffection
and protest against the government and its policiesthe unhappy
refuge of evacuees consumed by anger and despair.

The Decision to End Exclusion

The loyalty review should logically have led to the
conclusion that no justification existed for excluding loyal American
citizens from the West Coast. Secretary Stimson, Assistant Secretary
McCloy and General Marshall reached this position in the spring of 1943.
Nevertheless, the exclusion was not ended until December 1944. No
plausible reason connected to any wartime security has been offered for
this eighteen to twenty month delay in allowing the ethnic Japanese to
return to their homes, jobs and businesses on the West Coast, despite
the fact that the delay meant, as a practical matter, that confinement
in the relocation camps continued for the great majority of evacuees for
an other year and a half.

Between May 1943 and May 1944, War Department
officials did not make public their opinion that exclusion of loyal
ethnic Japanese from the West Coast no longer had any military
justification. If the President was unaware of this view, the plausible
explanation is that Secretary Stimson and Assistant Secretary McCloy
were unwilling, or believed themselves unable, to face down political
opposition on the West Coast. General DeWitt repeatedly expressed
opposition until he left the Western Defense Command in the fall of
1943, as did West Coast anti-Japanese factions and politicians.

In May 1944 Secretary Stimson put before President
Roosevelt and the Cabinet his position that the exclusion no longer had
a military justification. But the President was unwilling to act to end
the exclusion until the first Cabinet meeting following the Presidential
election of November 1944. The inescapable conclusion from this factual
pattern is that the delay was motivated by political considerations.

By the participants own accounts, there is no
rational explanation for maintaining the exclusion of loyal ethnic
Japanese from the West Coast for the eighteen months after May
1943except political pressure and fear. Certainly there was no
justification arising out of military necessity.

The Comparisons

To either side of the Commission's account of the
exclusion, removal and detention, there is a version argued by various
witnesses that makes a radically different analysis of the events. Some
contend that, forty years later, we cannot recreate the atmosphere and
events of 1942 and that the extreme measures taken then were solely to
protect the nation's safety when there was no reasonable alternative.
Others see in these events only the animus of racial hatred directed
toward people whose skin was not white. Events in Hawaii in World War II
and the historical treatment of Germans and German Americans shows that
neither analysis is satisfactory.

Hawaii. When Japan attacked Pearl
Harbor, nearly 158,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived in
Hawaiimore than 35 percent of the population. Surely, if there
were dangers from espionage, sabotage and fifth column activity by
American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry, danger would
be greatest in Hawaii, and one would anticipate that the most swift and
severe measures would be taken there. But nothing of the sort happened.
Less than 2,000 ethnic Japanese in Hawaii were taken into custody during
the warbarely one percent of the population of Japanese descent.
Many factors contributed to this reaction.

Hawaii was more ethnically mixed and racially
tolerant than the West Coast. Race relations in Hawaii before the war
were not infected with the same virulent antagonism of 75 years of
agitation. While anti-Asian feeling existed in the territory, it did not
represent the longtime views of well-organized groups as it did on the
West Coast and, without statehood, xenophobia had no effective voice in
the Congress.

The larger population of ethnic Japanese in Hawaii
was also a factor. It is one thing to vent frustration and historical
prejudice on a scant two percent of the population; it is very different
to disrupt a local economy and tear a social fabric by locking up more
than one-third of a territory's people. And in Hawaii the half-measure
of exclusion from military areas would have been meaningless.

In large social terms, the Army had much greater
control of day-to-day events in Hawaii. Martial law was declared in
December 1941, suspending the writ of habeas corpus, so that through the
critical first months of the war, the military's recognized power to
deal with any emergency was far greater than on the West Coast.

Individuals were also significant in the Hawaiian
equation. The War Department gave great discretion to the commanding
general of each defense area and this brought to bear very different
attitudes toward persons of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii and on the West
Coast. The commanding general in Hawaii, Delos Emmons, restrained plans
to take radical measures, raising practical problems of labor shortages
and transportation until the pressure to evacuate the Hawaiian Islands
subsided. General Emmons does not appear to have been a man of dogmatic
racial views; he appears to have argued quietly but consistently for
treating the ethnic Japanese as loyal to the United States, absent
evidence to the contrary.

This policy was clearly much more congruent with
basic American law and values. It was also a much sounder policy in
practice. The remarkably high rate of enlistment in the Army in Hawaii
is in sharp contrast to the doubt and alienation that marred the
recruitment of Army volunteers in the relocation camps. The wartime
experience in Hawaii left behind neither the extensive economic losses
and injury suffered on the mainland nor the psychological burden of the
direct experience of unjust exclusion and detention.

The German Americans. The German
American experience in the First World War was far less traumatic and
damaging than that of the ethnic Japanese in the Second World War, but
it underscores the power of war fears and war hysteria to produce
irrational but emotionally powerful reactions to people whose ethnicity
links them to the enemy.

There were obvious differences between the position
of people of German descent in the United States in 1917 and the ethnic
Japanese at the start of the Second World War. In 1917, more than
8,000,000 people in the United States had been born in Germany or had
one or both parents born there. Although German Americans were not
massively represented politically, their numbers gave them notable
political strength and support from political spokesmen outside the
ethnic group.

The history of the First World War bears a suggestive
resemblance to the events of 1942: rumors in the press of sabotage and
espionage, use of a stereotype of the German as an unassimilable and
rapacious Hun, followed by an effort to suppress those
institutionsthe language, the press and the churchesthat
were most palpably foreign and perceived as the seedbed of Kaiserism.
There were numerous examples of official and quasi-governmental
harassment and fruitless investigation of German Americans and resident
German aliens. This history is made even more disturbing by the absence
of an extensive history of anti-German agitation before the war.

* * *

The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not
justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from
itdetention, ending detention and ending exclusionwere not
driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes
which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a
failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese
Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an
atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan. A grave injustice was done to
American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without
individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded,
removed and detained by the United States during World War II.

In memoirs and other statements after the war, many
of those involved in the exclusion, removal and detention passed
judgment on those events. While believing in the context of the time
that evacuation was a legitimate exercise of the war powers, Henry L.
Stimson recognized that "to loyal citizens this forced evacuation was a
personal injustice." In his autobiography, Francis Biddle reiterated his
beliefs at the time: "the program was ill-advised, unnecessary and
unnecessarily cruel." Justice William O. Douglas, who joined the
majority opinion in Korematsu which held the evacuation
constitutionally permissible, found that the evacuation case was ever on
my conscience. Milton Eisenhower described the evacuation to the
relocation camps as "an inhuman mistake." Chief Justice Earl Warren, who
had urged evacuation as Attorney General of California, stated, "I have
since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating
it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom
and the rights of citizens." Justice Tom C. Clark, who had been liaison
between the Justice Department and the Western Defense Command,
concluded, "Looking back on it today [the evacuation] was, of course, a
mistake."

PART II: THE ALEUTS

During the struggle for naval supremacy in the
Pacific in World War II, the Aleutian Islands were strategically
valuable to both the United States and Japan. Beginning in March 1942,
United States military intelligence repeatedly warned Alaska defense
commanders that Japanese aggression into the Aleutian Islands was
imminent. In June 1942, the Japanese attacked and held the two
westernmost Aleutians, Kiska and Attu. These islands remained in
Japanese hands until July and August 1943. During the Japanese offensive
in June 1942, American military commanders in Alaska ordered the
evacuation of the Aleuts from many islands to places of relative safety.
The government placed the evacuees in camps in southeast Alaska where
they remained in deplorable conditions until being allowed to return to
their islands in 1944 and 1945.

The Evacuation

The military had anticipated a possible Japanese
attack for some time before June 1942. The question of what should be
done to provide security for the Aleuts lay primarily with the civilians
who reported to the Secretary of the Interior: the Office of Indian
Affairs, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the territorial governor.
They were unable to agree upon a course of actionevacuation and
relocation to avoid the risks of war, or leaving the Aleuts on their
islands on the ground that subsistence on the islands would disrupt
Aleut life less than relocation. The civilian authorities were engaged
in consulting with the military and the Aleuts when the Japanese
attacked.

At this point the military hurriedly stepped in and
commenced evacuation in the midst of a rapidly developing military
situation. On June 3, 1942, the Japanese bombed the strategic American
base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians; as part of the response a U.S.
ship evacuated most of the island of Atka, burning the Aleut village to
prevent its use by Japanese troops, and Navy planes picked up the rest
of the islanders a few days later.

In anticipation of a possible attack, the Pribilof
Islands were also evacuated by the Navy in early June. In early July,
the Aleut villages of Nikolski on Umnak Island, and Makushin, Biorka,
Chernofski, Kashega and Unalaska on Unalaska Island, and Akutan on
Akutan Island were evacuated in a sweep eastward from Atka to
Akutan.

At that point, the Navy decided that no further
evacuation of Aleut villages east of Akutan Island was needed. Eight
hundred seventy-six Aleuts had been evacuated from Aleut villages west
of Unimak Island, including the Pribilofs. Except in Unalaska the entire
population of each village was evacuated, including at least 30
non-Aleuts. All of the Aleuts were relocated to southeastern Alaska
except 50 persons who were either evacuated to the Seattle area or
hospitalized in the Indian Hospital at Tacoma, Washington.

The evacuation of the Aleuts had a rational basis as
a precaution to ensure their safety. The Aleuts were evacuated from an
active theatre of war; indeed, 42 were taken prisoner on Attu by the
Japanese. It was clearly the military's belief that evacuation of
non-military personnel was advisable. The families of military personnel
were evacuated first, and when Aleut communities were evacuated the
white teachers and government employees on the islands were evacuated
with them. Exceptions to total evacuation appear to have been made only
for people directly employed in war-related work.

The Aleuts' Camps

Aleuts were subjected to deplorable conditions
following the evacuation. Typical housing was an abandoned gold mine or
fish cannery buildings which were inadequate in both accommodation and
sanitation. Lack of medical care contributed to extensive disease and
death.

Conditions at the Funter Bay cannery in southeastern
Alaska, where 300 Aleuts were placed, provide a graphic impression of
one of the worst camps. Many buildings had not been occupied for a dozen
years and were used only for storage. They were inadequate, particularly
for winter use. The majority of evacuees were forced to live in two
dormitory-style buildings in groups of six to thirteen people in areas
nine to ten feet square. Until fall, many Aleuts were forced to sleep in
relays because of lack of space. The quarters were as rundown as they
were cramped. As one contemporary account reported:

The only buildings that are capable of fixing is the
two large places where the natives are sleeping. All other houses are
absolutely gone from rot. It will be almost impossible to put toilet and
bath into any of them except this one we are using as a mess hall and it
leaks in thirty places. . . . No brooms, soap or mops or brushes to keep
the place suitable for pigs to stay in.

People fell through rotten wooden floors. One toilet
on the beach just above the low water mark served ninety percent of the
evacuees. Clothes were laundered on the ground or sidewalks.

Health conditions at Funter Bay were described in
1943 by a doctor from the Territorial Department of Health who inspected
the camp:

As we entered the first bunkhouse the odor of human
excreta and waste was so pungent that I could hardly make the grade. . .
. The buildings were in total darkness except for a few candles here and
there [which] I considered distinct fire hazards. . . . [A] mother and
as many as three or four children were found in several beds and two or
three children in one bunk. . . . The garbage cans were overflowing,
human excreta was found next to the doors of the cabins and the drainage
boxes into which dishwater and kitchen waste was to be placed were
filthy beyond description. . . . I realize that during the first two
days we saw the community at its worst. I know that there were very few
adults who were well. . . . The water supply is discolored, contaminated
and unattractive. . . . [F]acilities for boiling and cooling the water
are not readily available. . . . I noticed some lack of the teaching of
basic public health fundamentals. Work with such a small group of people
who had been wards of the government for a long period of time should
have brought better results. It is strange that they could have reverted
from a state of thrift and cleanliness on the Islands to the present
state of filth, despair, and complete lack of civic pride. I realize,
too, that at the time I saw them the community was largely made up of
women and children whose husbands were not with them. With proper
facilities for leadership, guidance and stimulation . . . the situation
could have been quite different.

In the fall of 1942, the only fulltime medical care
at Funter Bay was provided by two nurses who served both the cannery
camp and a camp at a mine across Funter Bay. Doctors were only
temporarily assigned to the camp, often remaining for only a few days or
weeks. The infirmary at the mining camp was a three-room bungalow; at
the cannery, it was a room twenty feet square. Medical supplies were
scarce.

Epidemics raged throughout the Aleuts' stay in
southeastern Alaska; they suffered from influenza, measles, and
pneumonia along with tuberculosis. Twenty-five died at Funter Bay in
1943 alone, and it is estimated that probably ten percent of the
evacuated Aleuts died during their two or three year stay in
southeastern Alaska.

To these inadequate conditions was added the
isolation of the camp sites, where climatic and geographic conditions
were very unlike the Aleutians. No employment meant debilitating
idleness. It was prompted in part by government efforts to keep the
Pribilovians, at least, together so that they might be returned to
harvest the fur seals, an enterprise economically valuable to the
government. Indeed a group of Pribilovians were taken back to their
islands in the middle of the evacuation period for the purpose of seal
harvesting.

The standard of care which the government owes to
those within its care was clearly violated by this treatment, which
brought great suffering and loss of life to the Aleuts.

Return to the Islands

The Aleuts were only slowly returned to their
islands. The Pribilovians were able to get back to the Pribilofs by the
late spring of 1944, nine months after the Japanese had been driven out
of the Aleutian chain. The return to the Aleutians themselves did not
take place for another year. Some of this delay may be fairly attributed
to transport shortage and problems of supplying the islands with housing
and food so that normal life could resume. But the government's record,
especially in the Aleutians, reflects an indifference and lack of
urgency that lengthened the long delay in taking the Aleuts home. Some
Aleuts were not permitted to return to their homes; to this day, Attuans
continue to be excluded from their ancestral lands.

The Aleuts returned to communities which had been
vandalized and looted by the military forces. Rehabilitation assessments
were made for each village; the reports on Unalaska are typical:

All buildings were damaged due to lack of normal care
and upkeep. . . . The furnishings, clothing and personal effects,
remaining in the homes showed, with few exceptions, evidence of weather
damage and damage by rats. Inspection of contents revealed extensive
evidence of widespread wanton destruction of property and vandalism.
Contents of closed packing boxes, trunks and cupboards had been
ransacked. Clothing had been scattered over floors, trampled and fouled.
Dishes, furniture, stoves, radios, phonographs, books, and other items
had been broken or damaged. Many items listed on inventories furnished
by the occupants of the houses were entirely missing. . . . It appears
that armed forces personnel and civilians alike have been responsible
for this vandalism and that it occurred over a period of many
months.

Perhaps the greatest loss to personal property
occurred at the time the Army conducted its clean up of the village in
June of 1943. Large numbers of soldiers were in the area at that time
removing rubbish and outbuildings and many houses were entered
unofficially and souvenirs and other articles were taken.

When they first returned to the islands, many Aleuts
were forced to camp because their former homes (those that still stood)
had not yet been repaired and many were now uninhabitable. The Aleuts
rebuilt their homes themselves. They were "paid" with free groceries
until their homes were repaired; food, building and repair supplies were
procured locally, mostly from military surplus.

The Aleuts suffered material losses from the
government's occupation of the islands for which they were never fully
recompensed, in cash or in kind. Devout followers of the Russian
Orthodox faith, Aleuts treasured the religious icons from czarist Russia
and other family heirlooms that were their most significant spiritual as
well as material losses. They cannot be replaced. In addition,
possessions such as houses, furniture, boats, and fishing gear were
either never replaced or replaced by markedly inferior goods.

In sum, despite the fact that the Aleutians were a
theatre of war from which evacuation was a sound policy, there was no
justification for the manner in which the Aleuts were treated in the
camps in southeastern Alaska, nor for failing to compensate them fully
for their material losses.